Excellent MTM article

[hume]

The following is an excellent biographical article about Mary, that even includes her involvement with The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited. Anyone in Baltimore who can report back on what Mary will say there?

http://www.baltimoresun.com/features...ures-headlines

Making it, after all
Through on-screen triumphs and off-screen tragedies, Mary Tyler Moore stars in her own life.

By David Zurawik
Sun Television Critic

June 2, 2004

In the spring of 1977, as The Mary Tyler Moore Show was about to end its extraordinary seven-year run on CBS, its leading lady was suffering mightily.

"I could feel the separation anxiety welling up daily," Mary Tyler Moore wrote in her 1995 autobiography, After All.

"I had spent more of my waking hours with the people on this show than I did my real family. ... The years that loomed ahead in my vision without the show seemed cold and gray and threatening. I would have to come to terms with what my abilities were. Did I have any talent?"

Such dark thoughts! And from the actress who forever will be remembered as the adorable Laura Petrie warbling a trademark "ooohhhhh, Rob," to her TV husband on The Dick Van Dyke Show, or the exuberant Mary Richards of The Mary Tyler Moore Show joyously throwing a beret in the air on a downtown street in Minneapolis.

But the darkness ran even deeper: "If you look carefully while walking through the park, you will see that there are snakes in the trees. And those snakes are all knowing - they see your core."

Despite her tremendous success, Moore, who is speaking tonight in Baltimore as part of the Smart Talk Women's Lecture Series, has spent a lifetime trying to curb her anxieties and understand the fears and vast insecurity that haunt her.

Popularity and prestige came early with a featured role in The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-'66), and two Emmys came before she was 30 years old. Then, before the dust had hardly settled on her performance as Laura Petrie, she was starring in The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970 to '77), which would bring her three more Emmys as Mary Richards, a single career woman making it on her own. She earned another two Emmys for her work in made-for-TV movies, as well as an Oscar nomination for Ordinary People (1980), and a Tony Award for Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1980).

Dominating prime time

Her initials still grace what was once the most influential independent production company in Hollywood. She was a full partner with her then-husband, Grant Tinker, in a creative juggernaut that dominated prime-time network TV in the 1970s and '80s with such series as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, Rhoda, The Lou Grant Show, Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere - series that set a standard for excellence still emulated today.

Just last month, at 67, she was back in the arms of Dick Van Dyke and feted on the cover of TV Guide. The TV couple's reunion in the CBS special The Dick Van Dyke Show drew an audience of 14.5 million viewers, one of the highest-rated programs during the highly competitive May sweeps. And few stories written about the recent finales of Friends and Frasier neglected to pay homage to Moore's brilliant performance in The Mary Tyler Moore Show's own finale.

So, what about the snakes in the trees? "I don't know where this dark metaphor came from," Moore says in her book. "Nor do I understand the insecurities and self-doubts that created it."

But she seems to have negotiated some happiness in recent years at a country home in the Hudson River Valley of New York with 17 horses, two dogs and her third husband, Dr. S. Robert Levine, a cardiologist 18 years her junior whom she married in 1983. There have been ups and downs along the way, though, and Moore promises to talk about them tonight at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.

"What do we call it - this thing I'll do in Baltimore?" Moore said during a telephone interview last week. "It's not a lecture. It's not really a speech. It's a story. You know, it's almost an autobiography, and, in fact, a lot of what I say is based on things that I wrote about in my book, but now with an added overview of 10 years," she said.

"I just try to talk about where I've been, what my goals were starting out in the business and what they are now. It also touches on my private life, talking about how I met my husband, what my first two marriages were about. ... What I try to do is just talk honestly about my life."

Born in Brooklyn in 1936 to an alcoholic mother and a father who seemed to practice a particularly harsh form of Roman Catholicism, Moore harbors some dark early memories. In her autobiography, she recounts being sexually molested at age 6 by one of her parents' best friends. She told her mother, who told her it didn't happen.

"I never felt the same about her after that," Moore wrote. "My mother, by her denial, had abused me far more than her friend."

The family moved to Los Angeles in 1945. A grandmother and an unmarried aunt helped with the parenting during these years - most of all, finding a neighborhood dance school and getting her into it.

The fabulous steps she danced with Van Dyke in the mythical New Rochelle living room of Rob and Laura Petrie were learned at the Ward Sisters Studio of Dance Arts in Hollywood.

The day after her senior prom in 1955, she started a job as kitchen pixie for a series of Hotpoint Appliance television commercials that aired during The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet. Moore was married that same year to Dick Meeker, a food salesman. In 1956, she gave birth to a son, Richie.

Moore worked in television during the 1950s as a dancer in the chorus of The Jimmy Durante Show and as a sultry-voiced but never seen woman at a telephone-answering service in the 1959 season of Richard Diamond, Private Eye. Her big break came in 1960 when she was cast as Laura Petrie, she of the Capri pants, in The Dick Van Dyke Show.

"That was a happy time," Moore said of her run of almost two decades atop the prime-time world. "It was true of the Van Dyke show and the Mary show; those people, while I was working with them, were my tight-knit family. And like all good families, we had our happy times and we squabbled a bit, but we always managed to make up. It was really an essence in my life - those two groups and the shows we made."

Creations that click

The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show were two of those TV creations that click with something in the larger culture and take up residence in the popular imagination.

Moore's Laura Petrie was the middle-class version of Jackie Kennedy, who entered the White House with her husband at the same time that Laura and Rob arrived in our living rooms. As Mary Richards, Moore embodied the energy, optimism and best hopes of the women's movement at a time when it was regularly being distorted and even villified in much of the rest of the media.

"I can't tell you the number of people who talk to me about how our show was the inspiration for them individually to get into television, or journalism, or just plain [make] it on their own. And that's a very heady arena to be in," Moore said.

But Mary Richards runs even deeper than that in the psyche of some viewers. In his book Imaginary Social Worlds, University of Maryland anthropologist John L. Caughey cites women who so identified with the character of Richards that in moments of confusion or crisis, they would ask themselves, "What would Mary do?"

"That gives me chills," Moore said. "Do you remember when Marla Hansen, the young model, was knifed [in 1986 by thugs who slashed her face]? She said that same sort of thing immediately to the newspapers that were interviewing her. She said, 'I was so scared that I just kept saying to myself, "Now what would Mary do?" ' "

What Moore herself has done since tossing her beret for the last time in 1977 is to try to find life beyond the soundstages and back lots of Hollywood. It has not been easy.

In 1978, a younger sister, Elizabeth, died of a prescription-drug overdose combined with alcohol. In 1980, her son, Richie, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound that was ruled an accident. The next year, she and Tinker, then the head of NBC, divorced.

Moore became hooked on a deadly combination of vodka and Valium. In 1983, she checked into the Betty Ford Clinic, and started reclaiming control of her life. She would fall off the wagon a number of times before gaining sobriety.

While Moore has worked steadily in feature films, TV movies and on Broadway, she seems most passionate these days about her role as a spokeswoman for the Juvenile Diabetes Association and as a board member of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Moore was diagnosed with diabetes when she was 32. She says she has been "relatively lucky" in her struggle with the disease, although she has had several eye operations in recent years.

But as intense as she gets in describing her lobbying efforts in Washington on behalf of diabetes research, there is pure joy in her voice when she talks about the horses and dogs that she and her husband have rescued and brought to live on their farm. Moore doesn't hesitate when asked when and where her love of animals started: "That began when I was 9 years old and I was coming home from school one day and I saw a man beating a dog with a stick."

Moore says she unsuccessfully screamed at the man to stop.

"So, finally, I dropped my schoolbooks and ran and jumped him and beat him with my fist and my shoes, and he backed away slack-jawed.

"And the dog kind of shook himself, trotted off and then stopped and looked over his shoulder at me - and then he lifted his leg and peed."

She laughs at the memory.

"So, you don't always get the thanks that you want immediately, but that passion has stayed with me ever since. I have never lost my fierce protective feelings for and admiration of animals.

"It's the kind of bond that gets you through these awful times we're living in - with al-Qaida, with man's inhumanity to man. ... It's very difficult to deal with this stuff. And I find there is a closeness to a deity that exists for me with animals. I fully expect when I get up to heaven - and I'm determined to get there - I'm going to be greeted by a creature that says something like, 'Ruuffff, ruuffff, ruuffff.' "

Staff researcher Paul McCardell contributed to this story.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Talk

What: Smart Talk Women's Lecture Series with Mary Tyler Moore

When: 7:30 tonight (Pre-show activities begin at 6)

Where: Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall

Tickets: $35-$61

Call: 410-783-8000


Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

[Carrie]

That is a very good article. Thank you for sharing it with us.